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Comment by jonas21 | Hacker News Reader

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jonas21·

> When was the last time they did anything good?

Oh I dunno... how about that time they solved protein folding?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4

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Or the other reams of world class machine learning research and model weights they've released freely.

perhaps this is whoosh, but I thought Google wasn't releasing their model weights or source code, at least for a lot of things.

like with WaveNet, it was easy to train but computationally infeasible to run the way they published the paper. then it turns out there's a trick that makes playing it forward far more efficient, which Google later acknowledged using internally, but didn't disclose.

What kind of trick? At a glance wavenet looks like you could reuse most of the computation from earlier timesteps (would gave to take a closer look to see if it'd actually work), but I assume you're talking about something less obvious?

They don't always release weights and often the code and weights are delayed from the paper.

But more often than not they release a lot of their weights and/or research code.

An academic tour de force of little practical benefit, because of insufficient openness from the AF2 team. For nuance, see https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2020/12/08/alphafold2-cas...

that's great. Whom has been impacted by this and how, in more detail? I would say Google Maps is far more impactful and good than any protein folding....

This seems a bit disingenuous considering that progress and advancement in certain fields might not show a direct benefit until years down the line.

It's a building block that might pave the way for something else.

Right. It may not pan out however. Whereas the impact of Google Maps is already proven.

Mad science to prove the point.

You mean the time they bought the company that solved protein folding.

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